Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The long history of psychology in China is quite unknown in the countries of the West — and no less so in the Soviet hemisphere. In 1981 China will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Society of Psychology. But the history of Chinese psychology goes back even further to the roots of the specifically psychological aspects of thinking in traditional Chinese philosophy. As an independent scientific discipline, psychology came into being in the 1920s, when China began to develop modern science and education. In the early years of this century, Chinese scholars had already studied the then newly emerging discipline of psychology in the United States, England, Germany and Japan, and John Dewey himself went to China several times to introduce his pragmatic philosophy and educational reform, which were of the greatest importance to Chinese psychology.